The preliminary University of Michigan-Thomson Reuters consumer sentiment index fell to 74.5 from 82.7 in November.

That’s far below the 82.0 expected in a MarketWatch-compiled economist poll, eliminating four months of gains and also representing the biggest one-month drop since March 2011.

Those four months of gains came when people (and by people, I mean American workers and businessmen, not government class parasites) thought that there would be a change of leadership in Washington DC.

Now that it’s clear that there will be no such change in leadership and that the country is stuck with a man who thinks that he’s playing Monopoly when he’s actually playing Candyland, confidence is dropping sharply for the same reason that confidence in surviving a plane trip drops when your pilot announces that he has no idea how to fly, but that’s okay because jet engines are racist.

The experts assumed that nothing was wrong, but instead consumer confidence dropped 12 times more than forecast and the economic news falls into the category of bad and worse.